Satellite broadcasting to homes: Service options,policy issues and costs

Comsat's proposal to launch a direct-to-home broadcast satellite (DBS) service has stimulated a vigorous policy debate on a wide range of issues. The authors examine briefly the economic and technological factors that seem to favour new DBS services, suggest a panoply of services that could be provided via DBS, and relate the policy issues to specific potential services. They also present a financial analysis of a hypothetical firm's DBS pay-TV service, enabling them to suggest the possible shape of a new DBS industry.     

New directions in food marketing policies in LDCs

In recent years governments in developing countries have become more involved in the marketing of basic foods within their countries, but the policies adopted and the structures and approaches used have reflected many weaknesses and omissions. The support given by academic institutions and international advisory and funding organizations to policy makers has often been too narrow, or only partially appropriate. In this article, the author reviews recent work on marketing and suggests some major priorities for attention in the immediate future, and some new directions that could and should be explored.     

Sequentially Optimal Auctions

In auctions where a seller can post a reserve price but if the object fails to sell cannot commit never to attempt to resell it, revenue equivalence between repeated first price and second price auctions without commitment results. When the time between auctions goes to zero, seller expected revenues converge to those of a static auction with no reserve price. With many bidders, the seller equilibrium reserve price approaches the reserve price in an optimal static auction. An auction in which the simple equilibrium reserve price policy of the seller mirrors a policy commonly used by many auctioneers is computed.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C78, D44, D82.     

Ethical considerations for streaming business publications

This exploratory ethics study of a publication and presentation practice herein defined as streaming investigates the attitudes of deans of schools of business and business professors regarding such behavior. Streaming publications is the practice of presenting or publishing an article at one outlet and then taking the same article with perhaps minor revisions and presenting or publishing it at another publication outlet. The results of the survey suggest that the most important ethical behavior regarding streaming practices is disclosure. If authors fully disclose the intellectual history of a paper's developmental process, allegations of possible professional misconduct will be minimized if not eliminated.Vern C. Vincent is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Business Administration at the University of Texas — Pan American.Wig De Moville is an Accounting Professor at the same institution.     

The effects of feeding back experts’ own initial ratings in Delphi studies: A randomized trial

This study examined the effects of feeding back experts’ initial ratings on three Delphi outcome measures: (1) the percentage of items on which experts changed their opinion; (2) the degree to which experts changed their ratings towards the group response; and (3) the increase in the level of agreement among experts. Additionally, two conformity indices were developed. Within a real-world Delphi study, experts were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: either their initial ratings were included in feedback (IN) or excluded from feedback (EX). Results showed that experts in the EX condition changed their opinion relatively more often than experts in the IN condition. Results also suggested that experts in the EX condition changed their ratings to a greater degree towards the group response than experts in the IN condition. No difference between conditions was found regarding the increase in the level of agreement.